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A Montgomery County jury returned a verdict in December 2000, finding that Exxon defrauded Alabama on royalties from natural gas wells in state waters. The jury awarded the state $87.7 million in compensatory damages and $3.42 billion in punitive damages (Athan Manuel, 2007). 3.42 billion in punitive damages awarded in the Alabama case is virtually 1 billion more than the award set by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for us Plaintiff's in the Exxon Valdez and this was for stealing oil. How can...

The journal of Peveril Meigs and Richard Worsam Meade of their voyage to Alaska on the Saginaw.

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.Melt...

Becoming Big League is the story of Seattle's relationship with major league baseball from the 1962 World's Fair to the completion of the Kingdome in 1976 and beyond. Bill Mullins focuses on the acquisition and loss, after only one year, of the Seattle Pilots and documents their on-the-field exploits in lively play-by-play sections. The Pilots' underfunded ownership, led by Seattle's Dewey and Max Soriano and William Daley of Cleveland, struggled to make the team a success. They were savvy base...

Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning. Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native America...

In the years following World War II, the world’s biggest dam was almost built in Hells Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho. Karl Boyd Brooks tells the story of the dam controversy, which became a referendum not only on public-power expansion but also on the environmental implications of the New Deal’s natural resources and economic policy. Private-power critics of the Hells Canyon High Dam posed difficult questions about the implications of damming rivers to create power and to grow crops. Activ...

Makah families left the coastal village of Ozette in the 1920s to comply with the federal government’s requirement that they send their children to school, and by doing so they ended nearly two thousand years of occupation at this strategic whale- and seal-hunting site on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Archaeologist Richard Daugherty took note of the site in a survey of the coast in 1947 and later returned at the request of the Makah tribal chairman when storm waves began exposing both architec...

The story of the cattle barons has often overshadowed the experiences of the common cowboy on whose labor the ranchers’ wealth was built. Malcolm McLeod recorded the life of privation and danger of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mixed-blood cowboy. He worked for cattle owners across Montana and in southern British Columbia and eastern Washington. Born in Washington Territory in 1870 of Scotch, French Canadian, and Chippewa Indian heritage, McLeod traveled countless miles over t...

In The Fishermen's Frontier, David Arnold examines the economic, social, cultural, and political context in which salmon have been harvested in southeast Alaska over the past 250 years. He starts with the aboriginal fishery, in which Native fishers lived in close connection with salmon ecosystems and developed rituals and lifeways that reflected their intimacy. The transformation of the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska from an aboriginal resource to an industrial commodity has been fraught...

Seattle is a music town with rich, deep roots that have influenced the culture and identity of its civic life for decades. In a society that appreciates music but is ambivalent toward the profession of making it, the importance and contribution of Seattle's musicians have been routinely overlooked in historical accounts of the city. Kurt Armbruster fills that gap in this far-reaching and entertaining panorama of Seattle music from the 1890s to the 1960s, "before Seattle rocked." For this once-r...